Branch Rickey was a young baseball coach at Ohio Wesleyan in 1903 when he took his team to South Bend, Indiana, to play Notre Dame. The hotel refused an accommodation for the Bishops' star catcher, Charles Thomas, because he was black.

Rickey finally convinced the desk clerk to allow Thomas to room with the coach. According to legend, after Rickey checked on the rest of the team, he entered his room to find Thomas tearing at his skin with tears creasing his face.

"Black skin. Black skin. If only I could make them white," Rickey said Thomas was crying.

Rickey, then president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, relayed the story in 1946 while signing Jackie Robinson to break professional baseball's color barrier.

"I vowed that I would always do whatever I could to see that other Americans did not have to face the bitter humiliation that was heaped upon Charles Thomas," Rickey said.

Rickey was born in Stockdale, Ohio, an unincorporated village in Pike County at the southern end of the state. He grew up with a heavy interest in sports and was a catcher at Ohio Wesleyan, a school with a strong religious influence. That would play a heavy role in Rickey's future, too. He vowed to his mother not to play or attend baseball games on Sundays, a promise he adhered to throughout his career.

As an athlete, Rickey played professional football for the Shelby Blues, and was a Blues teammate of the first black professional, Charles Follis in 1902. His admiration for Follis, a star athlete with a gentleman's demeanor, also was reputed to be a strong influence on Rickey's role as a racial pioneer.

He played MLB, poorly, with the St. Louis Browns and New York Highlanders, but found his stride as an executive. After a stint as manager of the Browns and Cardinals, he moved into the front office and began to strut his stuff.

Rickey purchased a number of minor league clubs and began using them as a feeder system for the St. Louis Cardinals. The team flourished in the 1930s because of this approach, and it eventually was emulated by all other teams and continues to this day.

He moved on to Brooklyn and was the first to establish a permanent spring training site, Vero Beach, Florida, and also broke ground by using the batting cage, batting helmet, pitching machines and hiring statisticians to study the game.

But his greatest achievement came with the signing of Robinson. On Oct. 23, 1945, Robinson inked a minor-league contract with the Montreal Royals. It wasn't just altruism, Rickey saw his franchise could benefit from a player pool no one else was accessing.

"The greatest untapped reservoir of raw material in the history of our game is the black race," Rickey told The Associated Press.

After a successful 1946 season, Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947, and baseball never would be the same. Still, Rickey warned Robinson of the travails that lay ahead.

"Jackie, we've got no army. There's virtually nobody on our side. No owners, no umpires, very few newspapermen. And I'm afraid that many fans will be hostile. We'll be in a tough position," Rickey told Robinson, according to Bill Gutman's book "Giants of the Game." "We can win only if we can convince the world that I'm doing this because you're a great ballplayer, a fine gentleman."

Robinson went on to win Rookie of the Year honors in 1947, was National League MVP in 1949, and drew black fans to the ballpark in droves. His daring baserunning, in particular, revolutionized the way the game was played at the time.

Just as Rickey predicted, Robinson's emergence opened the floodgates of talent, particularly in the NL where black players won 12 of the 15 MVP honors between 1949 and 1963. Robinson was elected into the Hall of Fame in 1962, and never forgot the impact Rickey had on him personally as well.

"I realized how much our relationship had deepened after I left baseball," Robinson said in his autobiography "I Never Had it Made." "It was that later relationship that made me feel (when Rickey died in 1965) almost as if I had lost my own father.

"Branch Rickey, especially after I was no longer in the sports spotlight, treated me like a son."

lbphillips@nncogannett.com

419-521-7238

Twitter:@OhioPrepLegends

Trailblazers

Today is the second of a six-part series looking at Ohio's critical role in pioneering racial equality in athletics.